Britain

Wythenshawe and Sale East

It's Arnie wot won it

Labour won a stonking victory in the Wythenshawe and Sale East by-election yesterday. The result was unsurprising (the seat is in the suburbs of Manchester and is solid red) but the 11% swing to the party nevertheless delighted campaign bosses. For a while it had looked like UKIP, a populist anti-EU outfit, would come close to winning its first MP. The party attempted to portray Labour as metropolitan and out of touch—unsuccessfully, the outcome suggested.

Most of all, the by-election is being seen as a vindication of “community campaigning.” This involves drawing ordinary folk into the life of the party by focusing less on trooping up and down streets asking them how they intend to vote, and more on doing things to make their area better. This may involve clearing up rubbish in a park, setting up an after-school club or petitioning the council to pay its cleaners more. This shift serves two purposes. First, it chips away at locals’ cynicism about politics and party, battling claims that Labour is out of touch. Second, and most important, it builds "capacity”—politico-jargon for increasing the party's stock of experienced campaigners with a street-by-street knowledge of their constituency.

Convinced of these arguments, campaign bosses have made community campaigning a central plank of Labour’s plan for the 2015 election, making a series of structural changes to accommodate it. In 2011 Iain McNicol, the general secretary, started decentralising the party: giving candidates more latitude to focus on local issues and moving staff from co-ordinating roles in central office to training and supporting ones in the constituencies. Arnie Graf, an American who pioneered capacity-building in Baltimore and Chicago, has toured cities and suburbs guiding candidates. The approach is controversial. Some in the party fret that such do-goodery is a distraction from tried-and-tested, conventional campaigning.

Wythenshawe and Sale East was a test for the new methods. In previous by-election campaigns Labour’s high command had flooded seats with paid staff and other resources—effective enough, but impossible to replicate in a general election. This time it relied much more on the existing local infrastructure; essentially betting that Mr Graf’s training had created a sufficiently large, active and self-starting troop of volunteers in and around the seat to win it easily. These campaigners, brought in, won over and trained through street politics, were now responsible—under the leadership of Toby Perkins, the MP for Chesterfield—for rallying the Labour vote. A poll by Lord Ashcroft a week ago suggested that the plan was working: local residents were overwhelmingly more likely to say they had received a visit, letter or leaflet from Labour supporters than from those of any other party.

Yet it is still not clear whether the new method can work nationally. It is one thing to persuade the preternaturally Labour-supporting residents of Manchester estates to join the local candidate on a community campaign—quite another to do the same in leafy suburbs further south. Mr Graf has now visited all 106 of the party's target seats, producing big spikes in the number of volunteers and active supporters in them (many never join Labour, so are not accounted for in membership figures). Party bosses will be watching the polls there nervously, particularly in the heat of the 2015 campaign. If the “Graf effect” does not take hold, it may be too late to turn back.

Readers' comments

Strange but true, the swing to Ukip was 18pc which is much higher than the target of 15pc set by the party.

Other anomalies include postal votes being in just three days after the election was called, leaving no time for voters to consider what the different parties had to offer, and accusations have been made of threats and assaults against Ukip campaigners.

That the article fails to mention any of the above blows a hole big enough to get two Jag's through.